"We are the only country in history that ever deliberately changed its ethnic makeup, and history has few examples of 'diversity' creating a stable society." - Richard Lamm, former governor of Colorado

Friday, May 25, 2007

The policy of transferring South African land from white to black farmers will fail to deliver economic growth

The F. W. de Klerk Foundation – headed by the last white apartheid-era South African leader – rejected the idea that white farmers were to blame for the programme’s slow pace and criticised suggestions that the Government may introduce compulsory land sales.

Land is a racially divisive issue in postapartheid South Africa, where blacks were forcibly evicted from their land under segregational rule and colonialism.

Whites still dominate land ownership more than a decade after the end of apartheid. The black-led Government elected in 1994 pledged to address the imbalance.

Whites, who constitute about 20 per cent of the South African population, still own well over 90 per cent of farmland and officials have struggled to meet a target of handing a third of land to blacks by 2014.

The Government often buys land from white farmers to return to blacks deprived of ancestral land, but officials accuse farmers of inflating prices to stall sales.